My Experience with Duolingo So Far

I've been working with this about 2 months now after I was offered to join someone's family plan. Before I even begin, I can't stress enough that it's almost not even worth trying unless you're willing to pay exorbitant subscriptions. They do not want you do learn for free, trust me.

First off, it will not teach you the case system and there is no tab to study it directly. It will not *effectively* teach you the alphabet any better than just hearing/reading the words and sounding them out will. It also will not expand your vocabulary very significantly, at least as far as I've seen.

Duolingo, with all languages I've tried with it so far, is great for reinforcement of about 20 subject words and discussing how many horses are on the table, but it is absolutely terrible for teaching you how to structure thoughts in Russian and ESPECIALLY bad at properly conveying conversational flow. You get one sentence at a time, with no context, and often times inaccurate translation.

It is also not consistent with actual sentence structure, where you can create a grammatically correct sentence in Russian, but because it did not structurally match the English example, it is wrong despite meaning the same. I rarely ever get questions wrong due to an actual misunderstanding on my own part, and it's even worse when translating the Russian to English. Say you want to translate "Я думаю это не проблема." If you say "I think it is not a problem.", then you are correct. But it might mark you wrong if you say "I think it's not problem." even though it actually makes it harder to understand the Russian meaning when you are forced to 'perfectly' translate.

Sometimes they even mispronounce words outright because they fired people to replace with AI voices, AI curriculum, and best of all AI support because you can bet nobody will actually listen to feedback. There is no option to send feedback in regards to the actual experience and functionality of the app, only options regarding bugs or if someone somehow harasses you on Duolingo. It has only gotten worse in time, and more expensive on top of that. Removed features aplenty.

Overall, if you are looking to learn Russian, Duolingo is a nice little dopamine trap for a while but I HEAVILY urge you to seek other primary resources, and definitely some native Russian speakers if possible (discord is very accessible, many servers have multiple sections for different languages). Don't waste money if you don't have to. Also, sorry for the massive rant lmao but I know I'm not even close to the only one who feels this way.